


look down, you're standing in your grave

by gigi_originally



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Peter Pan & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Gen, Melancholy, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gigi_originally/pseuds/gigi_originally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In one universe, it happens like this. In the end, they are all rooted to their ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	look down, you're standing in your grave

**Author's Note:**

> Reads well to the sound of [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw2XzGl-AOw).

In another life, Wendy Darling's greatest adventure happens the day she meets a strange boy named Baelfire. She takes him home and her parents are kind to him. No shadows darken her window. The Darlings set Baelfire up in a school once they learn he is literate and he is allowed to come home to the Darlings for holidays. He takes the name of Neal Cassidy to fit the new world he lives in and grows into the kind of young man any woman would be happy to marry. In the end, he marries Wendy.

Wendy grows to be a beauty, delicate and demure. She had been a spirited child, full of fanciful beliefs and tall tales. Baelfire -- Neal -- had warned her about that. His words were quiet and vague, warning but not reproachful. It is his insistence, not anyone else's, which finally gets her to turn her eyes down from the clouds and stars. She attends primary school then finishing school. She becomes a proper young lady and eligible to wed. She marries Neal in the end, because she fell in love with no one else.

Their marriage is calm and quiet, much like her parents' had been. They have three children, Jane, Daniel and little sickly Henry, and a dog who reminds her of her childhood pet, Nana. Neal works with her Michael in a law firm; John follows Mr. Darling's footsteps and takes up work with the bank. Wendy and Neal are content. They do love each other and it is deep, enduring love. But they both know it is not quite true love. There is a part of each of them that holds on, in the forgotten corners of their believers' hearts, to magic. That magic tells them this is enough -- but this is not all. In the end, they ignore it.

One night, after putting the children to bed, Wendy goes to the nursery window. This is the house she has lived in all her life, she knows exactly which stars stare back at her from the heavens at this window. Something draws her to lean out and, for the first time in years, turn her eyes upward. The cosmos looks vast after so long, enticing and adventurous. She wonders why she ever stopped looking upward.

A flicker in the right corner of her eye catches her attention. She turns her head and sees two dim, distant stars. She knows them somewhere inside herself. Her soul remembers them even if her mind does not. The one on the right flickers feebly, a sad, pathetic thing in the sky. Her heart aches at the sight but Wendy does not know why. She watches it flicker, watches it struggle to keep alight. For a brief moment, she wills it to shine and it does. But then she glances away thinking herself pathetic, as a grown woman, to fancy herself magic enough to influence the stars. When she turns her eyes back to the dim pair, the star on the right sputters and goes out.

Wendy watches the place where it had shined in the sky for nearly an hour. It remains empty, another blank space in an endless void. Finally she closes her eyes and realizes her lashes are wet. She raises a hand to her cheek and feels tears. Her heart aches in echo of her mourning though she does not know why. She turns away from those stars and steps back into the nursery, into the warmth of the life she knows.

#

In a land far away, on an island made of enchantment and dreams, a boy dies. He had lived a life -- not a good life, by most standards, not a good one at all. There had been too much violence and blood and death for it to have been a good life. But he has lived a big life, an adventurous life, free. His life has been such that his feet hardly touched the ground. But now he lies in the cradle of his mother's embrace, the island itself holding its king in his last moments. He is old, for a boy, and tired.

Peter Pan dies on his island with a smile on his face and hole in his pitch-black heart. He never did figure out what he needed to fill it.

Around his corpse, Neverland crumbles to nothing.

#

In London, Wendy's feet feel heavy, her shoes like lead. She looks down at them and closes the window.


End file.
